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Tuesday, 14 October 2008

The man was flailing, the doctors saw his condition and some diagnosed somewhere between the trivial and the critical; it could become terminal, but no one knew what was wrong.

Between a twitching eye and a radical emergency yet unforeseen, the sceptics gathered and simply said the man was faking it, it could never be that serious, don’t waste precious medicine on him.

Meanwhile the experts were conducting all sorts of tests on him but no one could afford the cost of treatment that he fell into a cardiac arrest – rather than do something in the private hospitals, they were looking at the bill and the insurance costs of reviving the man as they allowed themselves to be stunned by the fact that they were losing him faster than they could think.

A global contagion

There were similar cases all around the world but no one thought the vector was the same, each medical team everywhere was prescribing their treatments without comparing notes as each and every one of the affected relapsed into a state that warranted a quarantine that roped in countries.

He was moved out of the hospital with gold-trimmings into the state hospital where doctors who had done serious inner-city medicine had other plans and ideas; rather than the finesse of cosmetic surgery effete they brought in the defibrillator.

Stand Back! A charge of $700 billion was applied as the pads hit the chest, a beep, but he was still flat-lining; this thing was looking like haemorrhaging fever of Ebola virus proportions, somebody had to do something - pretty damn quick, none of the medicine was working – yet, we were assured the shock would revive the man.

In another room, some were praying, some were swooning and probably more had resigned themselves to the last rites – the man was as good as dead.

Treatments from the land of penicillin

In the land of penicillin, the doctor who had been a house officer for 10 years was thinking about a new kind of treatment just as the man in Iceland had already been wheeled into the refrigeration of the mortuary and the stone rolled over in front of the cave – we learnt that the house officer whilst tending his patients realised that strain in Iceland had a similar DNA profile to some of the ailing patients around Europe and he pulled their supply line of adrenaline - the man died.

He then put forward a drug regime that had chemicals pumped into the men in a concoction that would have made a 1930s hospital look like a cosy kindergarten; the men still did not seem to revive, they were all terminal, if not fatal.

He kept the regime up and he must have felt like Jesus felt as he loved the free market capitalist system and its trappings so dearly, we had been buoyed by his humour, his camaraderie, his ability to make us feel so good even when we have been so bad and we were in quite a bad way already.

We wept as the grand palace of the most magnificent illusions and mirages that were thought we were living in suddenly disappeared without a souvenir to show for living the good life.

Lazarus rises from the dead

Over the weekend, the doctors compared notes and advocated regimes of treatment that looked like the regime that the man from the land of penicillin had instituted.

Roll away the stone, he said and he bellowed – Lazarus! Come forth! A man came out of the cave having been dead for days and the bandages were removed and he was given food.

Men are reviving everywhere now, the stock markets are gaining their highest ever rallies, meanwhile we are sure we would find out what was responsible for that bout of severe illness, the men were probably poisoned, there would be a strict regime of diet and freedom, the drugs are still being administered to avoid rejection where some men have had to have heart transplants - cash injection of trillions seems to have done the job, so far.

Those men who as cannibals had craved and eaten Dutch flesh have been throwing up without respite, somehow, the third did not get Spanish flu, what a strong constitution he must have - say I. Those up North would now never be able to get away scot free and be alone from the land of penicillin.

What a long day of harrowing weeks and troublesome months of foreboding at the hospital, we are not sure we have a cure yet.

Notes on the idea

This wraps the story of the resurrection of Lazarus round a serious medical contagion baffling the experts describing the bailouts and rescues of the banking systems around the world and falling stock markets.

The land of penicillin as you know is the United Kingdom where penicillin was discovered, everything else is simply the workings of a crazy imagination.